Settings in After Effects

[Kevin Camp]

i’m not familiar with your pc, but if it has multiple processors or cores, you can enable cs3 to use multiprocessing in the preferences. this will speed up renders and ram previews.

also, if you can live without disk cache enabled, this can help speed things up. if you need disk cache for some renders, set your raid0 for the drive to use for caching.

i’m not a big fan of opengl in ae, but if you check the help file for opengl, you will find a list of accelerated features and effects… if you use those feature/effects a lot in projects (things liike blending modes, motion blur, curves, gausian blur, etc.), then setting ae to use opengl always for previews, and also creating a render setting that enables opengl for final render (a check box in the render settings) may help out. however, opengl can get a bit flakey, so if things don’t seem to be working quite right in a project, try not using opengl and see if that helps.

the lag for the ram preview may be due to the compression of the footage you are effecting… do you notice the same lag if you were to generate effect without any footage? like if you just put in a layer with fractal noise, animate the evolutions and ram preview, do you see the same pause?

i’ve noticed that using footage that is compressed by a codec that uses temporal (or interframe) compression tends to create a pause prior to ram preview. using image sequences of any type, uncompressed formats or lossless animation codec are all good ways to avoid temporal compression.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW